Discussion

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.

This book became kind of surreal for me because I started reading it about 2 weeks before the election (Nov 8th, 2016) and finished right around the election time. Obviously during the election all one could hear and read about was Nate Silver (and to an extent Sam Wang?) so to hear him talk & tweet about his strategies and then be reading the book at the same time kind of gave an in-depth understanding about his mindset. It is very well detailed, very well structured on how he tackles individual forecasting topics one at a time. And then in the latter half he tries to explain why and how we mistake signal from the noise, and what we can do to avoid that mistake. Definitely an interesting read but for me it will always have the flavor of the 2016 elections whenever I think about this book - as if Nate Silver & elections were not already inextricably linked already before this.